Hand in Hand: An Autobiographical Novel by Rashel Veprinski

Translated by Ellen Cassedy and Anita Norich 

New York, 1918. One fateful winter night, Miriam Eidelberg finds herself strolling across the Williamsburg Bridge with her literary hero, the man whose poems she knows by heart. Nyezhiner, a star of his Yiddish artistic clique, is beguiled by the wistful girl at his side. But Miriam is married with a young daughter, while Nyezhiner, who is ten years her senior, has a wife, five children, and a womanizing reputation. Can these lovers find in each other the fulfillment they yearn for— and at what cost? This headily bittersweet novel takes us into the “Jewish tumult” of early 20th-century Brooklyn and the Lower East Side, where recent immigrants from Eastern Europe toil as shoemakers and tailors by day and cultivate a lively intelligentsia by night. An indelible portrait of a milieu and a timeless mapping of desire and freedom, Hand in Hand lays bare the human heart in all its frailty, tenderness, and tyranny.

Paperback, 194 pages, 10.8 ounces